Happy New Year, please
Before the holiday break from teaching, my Zoom class had a conversation about happy holidays and a joyous new year.
“But Miss Hacking,” one of my 7th graders asked “what if 2021 is even worse than this year?”
“I shudder to think about that,” I said, using one of our recent vocabulary words. Happy New Year, please. My students want a new year. Some of us need a re-do.
These past many months have required countless valiant attempts to remain hopeful. Things will get better. Life will improve. Our collective spirits will heal. Someday soon some semblance of life as we knew it will resume.
However, each time I reach acceptance, adjust my expectations and even find joy hidden within chaos, something new comes along to knock me off my axis.
(Tuesday, when I sent this column to my editor, 3,626 people had died, according to the New York Times).
The same pattern has unfolded with my Dad’s illness: Stay hopeful, look for improvements, pray for progress, pretty please. Then another unexpected ouchie arises.
First it was Dad’s cancer. Last week it was his kidneys. This week it is his heart and lungs.
Waiting and doing nothing can be exhausting. After a while you hold yourself so tightly that your body aches from the exertion of doing nothing.
Happy New Year, we implore.
Yes, implore was another of our 7th-grade vocabulary words.
Of course, there are plenty of things to learn, even in less than ideal circumstances.
During this pandemic I remembered how gardening helps my mind unwind. I remembered how the most rewarding part of friendship is simply talking (face-to-face), even if there is nowhere in particular to go. 2020 included many opportunities to tell people in my life how much they are treasured. No one should be denied the opportunity to hear that they are treasured. I also remembered, with every fiber of my being, that I want to travel the planet and see the sun, the moon and the stars from varied locations.
Odd garden weather
It’s almost the new year and I’m still enjoying fresh tomatoes from my garden. I picked them when the nights in Chico were beginning to dip into warm-jacket weather. The tomatoes were still only slightly pink.
I offered tomatoes to the usual suspects, but everyone in my immediate circle is pretty much sick of my tomatoes by now, dried or fresh.
As prolific as my plants have been this year, it seemed an insult to the plant to allow the perfectly good fruit to rot on the vine.
Dec. 18 I raced out of town because my father was in the hospital. I shoved everything perishable from my refrigerator into an oversized cooler and hit the road.
The tomatoes were tossed in as well.
Dad’s in the hospital again and my step-mom Lynda and I have been camped out at an extended-stay hotel in the middle of a strip mall. We’re highly COVID-conscious these days. When we see Dad again, we want to ensure we haven’t walked into someone’s COVID cough zone.
A week and a half later and those tomatoes are certainly coming in handy. I packed dry food items for the trip, including an outrageous supply of chocolate, Zebra popcorn and canned soup. However, a little